1.--If the fear should ever come upon you, my reader, of the
possibility of the Scriptures being discredited by present-day
controversies after having been accepted as God-given for three
thousand years, first pause for a moment, and let the full weight of
these thoughts press upon you of all that is implied in the fact (1)
that any set of old documents, always open to scrutiny and question,
should for thousands of years have been accepted as of Divine origin;
(2) that they should have been yielded to by men as an authority to
guide their conduct by commands often disagreeable to themselves; (3)
that this acceptance and obedience has been chiefly amongst the most
thoughtful and highly-cultured nations of the world; (4) that it has
gone on age after age, steadily increasing, and never in any age has
made more progress than in this cultured, enlightened, all-questioning
century in which we live.
2.--What has given these Scriptures such authority? Remember they were
only separate documents, often with hundreds of years intervening
between them, written by different writers of different characters to
different people, and under different circumstances. Remember that in
many cases we do not know their origin, or how they assumed their
present form. And yet somehow we never can reach back in their history
to a time when they were not treasured and reverenced among men as in
some way at least above human productions. There they stand, a long
chain of records with one end reaching away into the far back past, and
the other gathering around the feet of Christ.
And remember especially this, that they were selected out by no
miracle, that they rest on no formal decision or sentence of Church or
Council, or pope or saint, nay, not even of the Blessed Lord Himself;
for long before He came, for centuries and centuries there they stood,
testifying of Him, cherished and reverenced as a message that had come
from above "at sundry times and in divers manners". All study of their
history shows that their acceptance rested on no decision of any
external authority. They were accepted as of Divine origin for many
generations before they were gathered into any fixed collection. "The
Church", said Luther, "cannot give more force or authority to a book
than it has in itself. A Council cannot make that to be Scripture
which in its own nature is not Scripture".
It is true that the great Synagogue, or their official descendants,
collected the Old Testament Canon of Scripture. Yes, but when?
Somewhere about the time of our Lord, when the books had been for ages
recognised as of God. It is true that the Christian Church collected
the New Testament writings into a Bible, and arrived at a decision
concerning certain books the authority of which had been in debate.
Yes, but when? After they had been for 300 years accepted as the
God-given guide of the Church. _Evidently it was not their being
collected into a Bible that made them of authority, but rather the fact
of their possessing authority made them be collected into a Bible_.
3.--Again, I repeat the question, what gave them that authority? And
there seems no possible answer but this, that they possessed it of
themselves. They commanded the position they held by their own power.
Men's moral sense and reason combined to establish them. They appealed
by their own instrinsic worth to the God-given moral faculty, and the
response to that appeal through all the ages since is in reality the
main foundation of the Bible's position.
Look at the Old Testament. If we at the present day are asked why we
receive it as inspired, we usually reply that we receive it on the
authority of our Lord and His apostles. They accepted it as the Word
of God, and handed it on to us with their official approval of it.
Well, but why was it accepted before their day without any such formal
sanction? How did men come to believe and obey as Divinely inspired
the words of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and the rest? Except in
the case of Moses, there were no miracles or portents; no external
voice from heaven to command men's allegiance. They were not
established on their Divine supremacy by any single authority. Why
then were their utterances accepted?
It seems evident there can be but one answer. They asserted that
supremacy by their own intrinsic power. Men were compelled to
acknowledge that their declaration that "the word of the Lord had come
to them" was true. There was that in the messages of the prophets and
in the evidence by which they were accompanied, which compelled this
belief.
The books of the New Testament became recognised among Christians just
as the books of the Old Testament had been recognised among the Jews,
by virtue of their own inherent evidence. Certain witnesses came
forward and recorded in writing the teaching of our Lord, or announced
certain messages for which they had His authority, or the guidance of
His Spirit in communicating them to their fellows. Men had to decide
for themselves whether they believed those claims. The Apostles were
supported, indeed, in many cases by miracles, but not always; and
though those miracles afforded momentous evidence, they were not
recognisable in themselves, when standing alone, as decisive of the
whole question. No apparent miracle, it was felt, could of itself
authenticate a message from God which did not bear internal evidence
also of having proceeded from Him. The appeal in the early Church was
directed, as in the time of our Lord Himself, to the hearts and
consciences of men. He Himself could but appeal to those hearts and
consciences, and men accepted and rejected Him, not by reference to any
external authority, but in proportion to their capacity for recognising
His Divine character.
"_Thus from the first to the last, the authority of the Scriptures has
been equivalent to the authority with which they themselves convinced
men that they had come from God_."
I have been anxious to show you that the position of the Bible rests
not on any miracle, or any external authority of the Church or Council,
but on its appeal to the minds and consciences of men. You may doubt a
miracle, you may doubt your individual instincts, you may doubt the
competency of any one body of men; you cannot doubt so easily the
conviction of a hundred generations. They found in it a power to make
them good and they were convinced that it had come from God.[1]
Now consider that this Bible has held its authoritative position in the
face of the most violent attacks all through the centuries; that
infidels have dreamed that they had overthrown it and exploded it times
without number, with the result only that its power has steadily
increased, so that to-day it would be almost as easy to root the sun
out of the heavens as to root this Bible out of human life.
Take this single fact as an illustration. A hundred years ago Voltaire
refuted it quite satisfactorily, as it seemed to himself. "In a
century," he said, "the Bible and Christianity will be things of the
past." Well, how has his prophecy been fulfilled? Before his day the
whole world from the beginning of it had not produced six millions of
Bibles. In a single century since, and that too, the enlightened,
critical nineteenth century, _two hundred millions_ of Bibles and
portions of Scripture have issued from the press, in five hundred and
forty-three languages. And I have read somewhere that the house in
which Voltaire lived is now one of the depots of the Bible Society.